‘Washingtonian’ Writer Pens The Most Idiotic Column Of All Time / The Daily Wire

Washingtonian magazine senior editor Bill O’Sullivan wants people to stop using the phrase “start a family” because it’s offensive to both single people and couples without children.

In a piece published Thursday morning, O’Sullivan argues that the phrase “start a family” is “loathsome” because of its implication: children. “What this euphemism means is get pregnant — or try to get pregnant, or have a baby, or adopt,” Sullivan claims. And that’s offensive.

“Start a family devalues any couple who doesn’t happen to have kids, for whatever reason. It even sells single people short, who may not have children but do have ‘chosen’ families of friends,” he argues.

Conspiracy Theorists are right: the Russians have been contaminating America’s drinking water with “stupid pills” since the end of WWII.

O’Sullivan also points out that the phrase has “heterosexist” roots. He notes that LGBT people now use the phrase as well (implying it might not be “heterosexist” to say “start a family”) but he still hears it “more often from straight people.”

Either way, he says, “For the sake of all the ways to be in the world, it’s time to put an end to ‘start a family.’”

Also on O’Sullivan’s list of words to stop saying: “female.” He quotes a reader who told him that the word sounds “sounds like biology class.” For this reason, O’Sullivan agrees, the word should be avoided because it’s “dehumanizing.”

Like this:

Male egomania never ends: another scientific explanation of how the evolution of Homo sapiens was directed toward one achievement: in this case, being employed as a major league pitcher. Note how “we” means males; “all” means males. If being able to throw a fast ball at 96 mph is a significant test of being human, then there are maybe, 100 “real humans” on the planet. If you add up all “throwing sports” – a few thousand.

How Hurling Spears 2 Million Years Ago May Have Given a 96-mph Fastball

BY Rebecca Jacobson / PBS Science Wednesday 2013

When it comes to the ability to pitch a 90 mph fastball, humans are unmatched. Sure, chimpanzees can throw, but only at about 20 mph, a speed that wouldn’t land them a spot on a Little League team, said Neil Roach, a postdoctoral researcher in George Washington University’s Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology.

“If you look at any Little League baseball game in any town in America, you can find a 12- or 13-year-old kid that can throw 60 or 70 miles per hour on the mound at that game,” he said in a video produced by George Washington University. “And that to me is really remarkable performance. It’s what we allare capable of doing as opposed to the best athletes among us.” How do we go from a few talented-trained and practiced kids to WE ALL?

Roach and Dan Lieberman, professor of biological sciences at Harvard University, believe that early humans evolved this skill for hunting — specifically for hurling spears or rocks at small animals to kill and capture food. Their research is published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature. Backwards AGAIN: the case would have been that the environment favored individuals (pass on your genes) who could accurately throw-stun-or-kill animals; knock animals out of trees or otherwise protect a group from aggressive predators, including other humans. There is no “Big Guy in the Sky” who directs evolution toward isolated, specific goals, like throwing a fast ball.

Our arms act like small catapults, Lieberman said in a video from Harvard University. When the pitch starts, the player twists his torso to the side, causing his arm to draw as far back as he can. That motion creates and stores the elastic energy needed to launch the ball, Lieberman said. No one is born being able to do this; why ignore training and practice and peculiar talent?

“We’re the only creature in the world that can throw really hard and really fast at the same time,” Lieberman said — and we do it pretty accurately. “When you throw, you cock your arm back, and when you do that you’re stretching, basically loading your upper arm like a catapult or a sling. And what we discovered is about half the energy you impart to a ball or a spear when you throw it comes from that elastic energy storage.” Nice physio-biology – but who is “you”? Not females, who have a different throwing style to males. Hence the pejorative “You throw like a girl.”

But of course: Male scientists never consider that females are intrinsic to human evolution: instead, females (if even noticed) were merely hanging around popping out (male babies) over the previous 2 million years, watching males evolve into Homo sapiens.How nice of them to let us tag along.

Throwing is the fastest motion the human body is capable of producing, Roach said, thanks to that elastic energy.

But in order to wind up for that powerful pitch, three major changes in our anatomy had to occur, the authors determined. First, we had to develop a longer torso, a product of walking upright seen in our australopithecine relatives 4 million years ago. And that torso had to be able to pivot independently of our lower body. Yes, we had to do things because evolution’s Big Guy in the Sky was planning ahead – to invent a game called baseball.

Here we see the obvious: this is MALE anatomy. (Females probably used their brains to figure out their own “food strategies” – but no; “science knows” that females sat around helpless and dependent. Second, we needed broad, flat shoulders so our arms could create a right angle, allowing our shoulders to more effectively store and release elastic energy.Try scrunching your shoulders toward your chin and throwing overhand; you’ll see why our australopithecine ancestors had a hard time. Finally, the humerus, the long bone in the upper arm, rotates where it meets the shoulder socket, something called humeral torsion. That “twist” translates to how far you can cock your arm back, Lieberman said in the video, which meant you could store more energy to impart to the ball.

And while some of these characteristics appear in early Australopithecus, all three elements appear together in Homo erectus, an ancestor that appeared about 2 million years ago, Roach said. Roach and Lieberman believe that by developing our throwing power, we were able to take down larger animals with rocks and spears — a real game-changer.

Neil Roach is looking for how humans’ throwing power explains early hunting. Photo by William Atkins/GW University Photographer Another male egomaniac!

“Hunting matters because more calories in your diet means you can build bigger bodies and bigger brains and have more babies, all of the things that matter for evolution,” Roach said. Well, thank-you for giving females something to do! (Or does he mean that hunting “improved” sperm quality?)

Rick Potts, director of the Smithsonian’s Human Origins Program, doesn’t entirely agree with Roach and Lieberman’s theory. The first evidence of spears, our most powerful primitive weapons, appeared 400,000 years ago in Europe, 1.5 million years after the emergence of Homo erectus, Potts said. Homo erectus could have thrown rocks to drive away predators, he said, but the tools and skills for hunting large game didn’t appear until later.Just make up a story as you go along. Why not? It’s not like we’re doing science!

“Once you get to large animals, if you don’t hit it right where you want to every time, you just enrage the creature,” Potts said, adding that even professional pitchers miss the catcher’s glove half the time. “We don’t see points that could penetrate hide until much later in archeological records.”

Also unclear is when exactly our shoulders settled into the right position (bizarre!) to throw a weapon, said Owen Lovejoy, professor of anthropology at Kent State University, so it may not have been a primary driver in the selection process for Homo erectus. And a lot more goes into hunting than just physiology, he added.

“I wouldn’t rule out the role of the brain in a human’s ability to throw,” he said. OMG!

Roach says the team is continuing their research, searching for evidence of early projectiles to explain pre-spear hunting, and to determine how or if early humans could have taken down prey by throwing rocks or sharpened sticks.

And while modern throwing skills are largely recreational now, Roach said, understanding better how the shoulder moves and stores energy during a throw will help prevent injury for modern athletes, who sling high-speed pitches dozens of times every game. Do I smell fishing for funding by Major League Baseball?

“What happens is that people actually injure their shoulders and they injure their elbows,” Roach said. “So at the end of the day, the ability that we have to store elastic energy in our shoulder makes us great throwers, but it’s also injuring us.”

The Evolution of Our Throwing ShoulderNeil Roach, post doctoral researcher at George Washington University, explains how humans have the ability to throw with such high velocities and why this made a difference in our evolution.

So here we are again: Backwards evolution; 1. this forces us to assume that a rock or stick can be thrown at 90+ miles an hour (I don’t think physics would bear this out. A baseball is a sphere for a reason.) 2. Male physical structure was identical to modern fast-pitch athletes. 3. And humans over the past 2 million years ate only meat obtained by killing animals with thrown objects.4.Oh yes – and females were not involved in evolution.

Excerpt: To understand why a girl “throws like a girl,” it’s necessary to define just what throwing like a girl is. According to Thomas, a girl throwing overhand looks more like she’s throwing a dart than a ball. It’s a slow, weak, forearm motion, with a short step on the same side as the throwing hand. A boy’s throw, by contrast, involves the entire body. Thomas describes a skillful overhand throw as an uncoiling in three phases: step (with the foot opposite the throwing hand), rotate (with hips first, then shoulders) and whip (with the arm and hand).

Girls don’t do any of those three steps as successfully as boys, but Thomas zeroes in on one aspect in particular: the rotation.

The power in an overhand throw — and in a golf swing, a tennis serve or a baseball swing — comes from the separate turning of hips and shoulders. The hips rotate forward and the body opens, and then the shoulders snap around. Women tend to rotate their hips and shoulders together, and even expert women throwers don’t get the differential that men get. “The one-piece rotation is the biggest difference,” says Thomas. “It keeps women from creating speed at the hand.” Even when women learn to rotate hips and shoulders separately, they don’t do it as fast as men.

You can’t call it “SCIENCE” if it’s NOT.

A bug in fMRI software could invalidate 15 years of brain research / This is huge.

BEC CREW 6 JUL 2016

There could be a very serious problem with the past 15 years of research into human brain activity, with a new study suggesting that a bug in fMRI software could invalidate the results of some 40,000 papers.

That’s massive, because functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is one of the best tools we have to measure brain activity, and if it’s flawed, it means all those conclusions about what our brains look like during things like exercise, gaming, love, and drug addiction are wrong. “Despite the popularity of fMRI as a tool for studying brain function, the statistical methods used have rarely been validated using real data,” researchers led by Anders Eklund from Linköping University in Sweden assert.

The main problem here is in how scientists use fMRI scans to find sparks of activity in certain regions of the brain. During an experiment, a participant will be asked to perform a certain task, while a massive magnetic field pulsates through their body, picking up tiny changes in the blood flow of the brain.

These tiny changes can signal to scientists that certain regions of the brain have suddenly kicked into gear, such as the insular cortex region during gaming, which has been linked to ‘higher’ cognitive functions such as language processing, empathy, and compassion.

Getting high on mushrooms while connected to an fMRI machine has shown evidence of cross-brain activity – new and heightened connections across sections that wouldn’t normally communicate with each other.

It’s fascinating stuff, but the fact is that when scientists are interpreting data from an fMRI machine, they’re not looking at the actual brain. As Richard Chirgwin reports for The Register, what they’re looking at is an image of the brain divided into tiny ‘voxels’, then interpreted by a computer program.

“Software, rather than humans … scans the voxels looking for clusters,” says Chirgwin. “When you see a claim that ‘Scientists know when you’re about to move an arm: these images prove it,’ they’re interpreting what they’re told by the statistical software.”

To test how good this software actually is, Eklund and his team gathered resting-state fMRI data from 499 healthy people sourced from databases around the world, split them up into groups of 20, and measured them against each other to get 3 million random comparisons.

They tested the three most popular fMRI software packages for fMRI analysis – SPM, FSL, and AFNI – and while they shouldn’t have found much difference across the groups, the software resulted in false-positive rates of up to 70 percent.

And that’s a problem, because as Kate Lunau at Motherboard points out, not only did the team expect to see an average false positive rate of just 5 percent, it also suggests that some results were so inaccurate, they could be indicating brain activity where there was none.

“These results question the validity of some 40,000 fMRI studies and may have a large impact on the interpretation of neuroimaging results,” the team writes in PNAS.

The bad news here is that one of the bugs the team identified has been in the system for the past 15 years, which explains why so many papers could now be affected.

The bug was corrected in May 2015, at the time the researchers started writing up their paper, but the fact that it remained undetected for over a decade shows just how easy it was for something like this to happen, because researchers just haven’t had reliable methods for validating fMRI results.

Since fMRI machines became available in the early ’90s, neuroscientists and psychologists have been faced with a whole lot of challenges when it comes to validating their results.

One of the biggest obstacles has been the astronomical cost of using these machines – around US$600 per hour – which means studies have been limited to very small sample sizes of up to 30 or so participants, and very few organisations have the funds to run repeat experiments to see if they can replicate the results.

The other issue is that because software is the thing that’s actually interpreting the data from the fMRI scans, your results are only as good as your computer, and programs used to validate the results have been prohibitively slow.

But the good news is we’ve come a long way, and Eklund points to the fact that fMRI results are now being made freely available online for researchers to use, so they don’t have to keep paying for fMRI time to record new results, and our validation technology is finally up to snuff.

“It could have taken a single computer maybe 10 or 15 years to run this analysis,” Eklund told Motherboard. “But today, it’s possible to use a graphics card”, to lower the processing time “from 10 years to 20 days”.

So going forward, things are looking much more positive, but what of those 40,000 papers that could now be in question?

Just as we found out last year that when researchers tried to replicate the results of 100 psychology studies, more than half of them failed, we’re seeing more and more evidence that science is going through a bit of a ‘replication crisis’ right now, and it’s time we addressed it.

Unfortunately, running someone else’s experiment for the second, third, or fourth time isn’t nearly as exciting as running your own experiment for the first time, but studies like this are showing us why we can no longer avoid it.

Like this:

Female Aspergers are often described as “Chameleon-like” in the propensity to take on the psychic and behavioral aspects of a social environment in order to (at least temporarily) hide in plain sight. This supposedly accounts for the common undiagnosed-state of female Aspies.

This is a gross misunderstanding of what Chameleons actually “do.”

Male Chameleons change to bright colors (red-yellow) to stand out against a natural green-brown environment.They are “showing off” in a mating display or other communication.

This obviously is not a correct analogy to the real or imaginary attempt by some female Aspergers to blend into the social scene.

Camouflage in it’s active form in Homo sapiens is a male specialty.

Modern humans have developed camouflage predominantly as a predatory strategy in military actions or in hunting. A vast (and extremely serious) subculture exists that promotes and supplies camo gear for use by civilians and professionals. Business is booming!

Camouflage has become a cult fashion bonanza: Pepto-Pink is mandatory for girls, which defeats the function of camouflage, unless one is trapped in the Pink Hell of American female fashion.

So what are Asperger females doing to survive Neurotypical Social Hell?

Unbelievable!

Draw a Person Test (DAP) – a great way to tell a kid’s intelligence

Recently I took my son to the doctor for his yearly check-up. The Doctor asked the usual medical questions, then he asked me about his development.

“Does he know how to draw a person?”

I answered probably yes; he draws dinosaurs all the time. The doctor gave my 4 year old son a piece of paper and asked him to draw a person. My son started with a head, then a body, arms, legs, some eyes and mouth on the head – in the right places and added some hair. Just a stick figure, but the doctor said it was interesting. He then explained the theory behind the DAP Draw a Person test. (This bit of fakery qualifies as “theory?)

He said that at the test is universal.(More of the “humans are manufactured on an assembly line” BS) Studies show that results are similar in all children around the world. The way a child draws a person determines his developmental stage. (Inverted: The developmental stage would determine the characteristics of the drawing)You can pretty much test for intelligence with a simple drawing. At the age of 3 kids begin with circles and lines, but can’t really make a stick figure look like a real person. By age 4, they are supposed to start drawing people more like we are; head, arms, legs. At the mental age of 4, most kids draw the arms and legs coming out of their heads, but no body. My son’s picture had a body. The doctor said that this meant that his mental development stage is that of a 5 year-old. I always knew my son was smart. (Narcissistic parent achieving status by inflating child’s IQ)

I wanted to know more about this cool type of test, which I found out has been around for a whole century, and it’s been used everywhere in the world, for children as old as 13. Psychologists use it to also analyze emotional stability. (An example of illegitimate “conversion” of a psychological instrument (joke) to whatever the hell the psychologist “feels like” using it for.) It is the perfect test, because it is very simple and non-invasive, but tells us so much about the child. (Of course: it’s “cool” – it’s magic!)

To give the test, the child is simply told to draw a person with not much explanation. The finished drawing is awarded points by the psychologist, depending on the details. Are the proportions correct? Are there details like clothes? Based on the child’s age and the points awarded, the child’s mental age is given. Cool! (Mental age – another psychological construct that has no scientific basis except for assembly-line blueprints invented by psychologists)

A few days later I found a picture of a stick figure in my son’s school bag. The hands and legs were attached to its head. I was shocked… had my son’s mental age dropped since his appointment? When I asked, Did you draw this he answered that another child had drawn it to give to him. He was so pleased that his friend had done this, and I was happy to see that the DAP test is for real.” (I see, it’s “real” because the MOTHER used it and abused it to confirm her narcissistic belief that her son is “smart” and his friend is “dumb”!)

Update: I just found a scoring guide for the DAP test and used it to score a drawing from when my son was 3 ½ years old. I gave it a score of 8. This means that he had a mental age of 5 years old, which can be divided by my son’s chronological age to give him an IQ of 130. Cool!”

American Parenting: Use magic-based bogus “tests” provided by psychologists to prove that your child is “brilliant” in order to put a rocket under your feeble self-esteem. So what if it’s quackery?

From the guide for assessing the DAP test of a child’s drawing:

Hmmm… Sounds like psychologists are self-assessing again!

Drawing is a “skill” that varies by individual according to native ability, observation, art lessons and training, amount of practice, and exposure to art – living in a pro-art environment.

Did Neanderthals Have Souls?

Don’t ALL questions regarding the nature of reality pose a difficulty to Christians? Yes.

…the discovery of a relatively advanced human ancestor (Homo naledi, South Africa)also raises theological questions, particularly for Christians who believe that a person must believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to receive eternal life in Heaven. It may sound silly to apply that standard to primitive species hovering millions of years ago between animal and human, but it’s an important question if you believe in the eternal soul. Silly? How ’bout INSANE?

The broader issue is what happens to the soul of anyone born before Jesus Christ..

BAT_CRAP CRAZY!

I suppose Mormon families are now searching through the Mormon Genealogy Archives for Neanderthal souls to STEAL, and then “baptize” as THEIR family members? Yes, they do this: a Mormon family stole two of my ancestors, inserted them into their family history, (despite pregnancies then having to be reduced to 2 months, and 3 months) Yes, this is a “real” Mormon religious practice. Why do you imagine they are so “into” collecting genealogy records from all across the globe? They get “Moron Points” for doing this –

Like this:

Can neurotypicals get any more idiotic? The answer, of course, is

YES!

Let’s just accept the fact that sexual assault occurs: yes, the predator is usually male, and the prey female, but all types of assault occur, and the “victim” can be of either gender, age, race or ethnicity…

Why is sexual assault any different in infliction of pain, injury, psychological trauma and damage to family and community as well as the terror inflicted on the victim? This IS a critical question.

Isolating sexual assault from “ordinary” assault intensifies the portrayal of women as incompetent targets of male aggression and as inferiors – just one more category of male property. . This is typical of the religious hangover that persists in all areas of American culture. A woman’s reproductive apparatus is the property of a male, the same as any “farm animal”. Her uterus is of value as the vehicle for male genetic and social continuance. The Bible says so; it must be so!

Backing up this claim is like shooting fish in a barrel: MORE Bible QUOTES at: ValerieTerico.com

A wife is a man’s property: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor. Exodus 20:17

Daughters can be bought and sold: If a man sells his daughter as a servant, she is not to go free as male servants do. Exodus 21:7

A raped daughter can be sold to her rapist:28 If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, 29 he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 He has violated the father’s property rights – who must be paid.

Used brides deserve death: If, however the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. Deuteronomy 22:20-21.

Women, but only virgins, are to be taken as spoils of war: Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, 18 but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man. Numbers 31:17-18

Menstruating women are spiritually unclean:19 “‘When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. 20 “‘Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean. 21 cont., at ValerieTerico) Leviticus 15: 19-31

A woman is twice as unclean after giving birth to girl as to a boy: . Leviticus 12: 1-8 cont,

A woman’s promise is binding only if her father or husband agrees: 2 When a man makes a vow to the LORD This usage seems to imply an ACTUAl “Lord” as in, a real person who holds a position higher up on the social pyramid, rather than a “supernatural god.” or takes an oath to obligate himself by a pledge, ….cont.

Women should be seen not heard: Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. 1 Corinthians 14:34

Wives should submit to their husband’s instructions and desires: Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Colossians 3:18

In case you missed that submission thing . . . : Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. 23 For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. 24 Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything. Ephesians 5:22-24. cont.

More submission – and childbearing as a form of atonement: A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 Corinthians 11:2-10

Sleeping with women is dirty: No one could learn the song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. 4 These are those who did not defile themselves with women, for they remained virgins. Refers to virgin male slaves (children) as human sacrificial victims? They follow the Lamb wherever he goes. They were purchased from among mankind and offered as first-fruits to God and the Lamb. Revelation 14:3-4

So – to sexually assault a girl or woman is to “insult” a man’s property, whether or not it’s the husband, promised husband, father or any male relative. Since ALL WOMEN are owned by males, A MAN “owns” her “reproductive parts” and capabilities. HE must assure paternity by controlling virginity.

How do these “ideas” influence American attitudes and actions surrounding the “social issue” of sexual assault?

Women have had to fight to “free” their reproductive / sexual “assets” from male control. Until women had access to birth control methods and modern technology, this “taking back” of ownership of one’s body (a very recent medical and legal possibility that remains forbidden to millions of women around the world), THIS WAS SIMPLY A BIOLOGICAL IMPOSSIBILTY. Total abstinence from sexual activity (wanted or unwanted) was the only option.

No woman ought to “go to waste” according to male thinking. This utterly dehumanizing “idea” was often heard by women of my generation as a “reason” why we ought to marry young, have children, and consent to “unlimited sexual availability” to our new owner – The Husband.

The “means” by which males establish status throughout “civilized” history has always included rape. To invade another male’s “territory” through rape of “his” women (or men) is to compromise a male’s genetic legacy – a biological drive that has become a foundation of the Social Hierarchy. This act of aggression is open to males of ANY SOCIAL STATUS, but of course the consequences are radically different for “top males” – sexual aggression is a requirement of life at the top.

I’m a woman and claim my body, mind and physical-psychic boundaries to be mine and mine only. This is not as common a declaration as one might hope. Young women are being taught that their DESTINY is to be passive victims, not only by the relentless pop culture depiction of even young children as “whores” whose only function is to be pornographic objects, but by elite educated women who have their own agenda: the use of genuine social injustice as a political weapon – to increase their own position in the social hierarchy.

Assaulted once: twice made victims. An outrageous claim? Not really, when one considers the evidence.